Panti in Hot Waters

The interview with Panti Bliss (Rory O’Neill) on Brendan O’Connor’s Saturday Night Show was taken offline following ‘legal issues’.

O’Neill was talking about homophobia and how attitudes have changed relatively quickly in Ireland. The following transcripts with thanks to Krank.ie h/t Neil before Zod

“I bet every single person in this audience has a cousin or a neighbour or the guy who you work with who is a flaming queen! I mean, you all know one. And it’s very hard to hold prejudices against people when you actually know those people. Because Ireland is such small communities grouped together, everybody knows their local gay!

Maybe twenty years ago it was ok to be really mean about him, but nowadays it’s just not ok to be really mean about it.
The only place that you see it’s ok to be really horrible and mean about gays is on the internet in the comments and people who make a living writing opinion pieces for newspapers.”

When O’Connor asked who the writers were that O’Neill was talking about he named Breda O’Brien and John Waters, as well as the Iona Institute.

“Y’know, just feck off! Get the hell outta my life! It astounds me there are people out there in the world who devote quite a large amount of their time and energies to trying to stop people achieving happiness.”

RTÉ has edited the video clip to remove that section and Broadsheet have also removed their post with transcript.

RTÉ in a statement to Journal.ie said:

“Last weekend’s The Saturday Night Show was removed from the Player due to potential legal issues and for reasons of sensitivity following the death of Tom O’Gorman as would be standard practice in such situations.”

Panti has confirmed with us that no mention of Tom O’Gorman was made to him when he spoke to RTÉ about the cutting of the clip, other ‘legal’ reason was given to him. He has confirmed that he has received 4 letters from solicitors representing 4 members of the Iona Institute but none from John Waters. The 4 are – Breda O’Brien, David Quinn, Patricia Casey, and John Murray.

“Last weekend’s The Saturday Night Show was removed from the Player due to potential legal issues and for reasons of sensitivity following the death of Tom O’Gorman as would be standard practice in such situations.”

I don’t understand this. Are they saying there was something “gay” about Mr O’Gorman’s horrific murder? If memory serves (It was last week – my memory isn’t that bad), there were a few murders in this shithole over the same period.

The Iona shower can go fuck themselves. And Waters and O’Brien can join in.